Marks and Routes

• Marks
• Create a Mark
• Move a Mark
• Delete a Mark
• Undo-redo a Mark
• Right-Click on a Mark
• Use your own Icons

Located in Toolbar Buttons Pages

• Create Route
• Route Concepts
• Create a Route
• Create Route
• Modify a Route
• Multiple Routes
• Saving and Loading Routes and Marks
• Activate Route & Active Route Console
• Active Route Console Window
• Active Leg and Full Route Data
• Route to Autopilot
• Route to Autopilot

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Route Triangle Shipwreck MOB Create Route

First right-click on the chart and pick “Drop Mark”

Then right click nearby and select “Undo Create Waypoint”

Or right-click on the Mark and select “Delete”

Are the basic points that are used for many things, such as creating routes, marking fishing spots, good anchorages or anything of interest.

Once a mark is created a focused right-click dialog becomes available, when clicking on the mark.

There are a few ways to directly create marks.

• at boat's position “Ctrl + O”.
• at cursor position “Ctrl + M”.
• at cursor position “Right-click” & press “Drop Mark”.

Marks are created at the start of each leg in a route, and one at the end of the route. More about routes a bit further down this page.

Marks created these ways will have a triangular icon, except for routes that uses a diamond, but no name.

The default icon, when creating a mark, is possible by changing the the value “DefaultWPIcon” in the opencpn.ini (config) file. Use the name of any available icon in the properties dialog.

More Detail In the [Settings/Others] section set the option DefaultWPIcon to one of:

empty, airplane, anchorage, anchor, boarding, boundary, bouy1, bouy2, campfire, camping, coral, fishhaven, fishing, fish, floating, food, fuel, greenlite, kelp, light, light1, litevessel, mooring, oilbouy, platform, redgreenlite, redlite, rock1, rock2, sand, scuba, shoal, snag, square, triangle, diamond, circle, wreck1, wreck2, xmblue, xmblue_, xmgreen, xmgreen_, xmred, xmred_, activepoint

values representing the default set of built-in icons or to a filename of any of your UserIcons, without the the path and .xpm extension. If you have a file called MyICON.xpm in the user icons folder, the value will be simply MyICON

You can move the mark by left-click-dragging it around. To prevent accidental movement of marks go to Options > Ships > Routes/Points > Control Options (v4.8.8 menu: Options>Display>Advanced) and click the box “Lock Waypoints”. Another alternative to move a single mark or waypoint is to right click on it, select properties and move the mark. Then close properties to lock the mark.

You can delete a mark by right-clicking its icon, and selecting “Delete”.

There is an built in undo/redo buffer for creating, deleting or moving marks or waypoints. If you have just created, deleted or moved a mark the right-click dialog will have relevant entries. The undo/redo, for moving or creating marks, follows a straight time-line and is not tied to an individual mark.

Above is a right-click menu just after moving a mark a few times and undoing the last move, and one mark was deleted, and then the deletion was undone. CTRL + Z and CTRL + Y works as hot-keys for undo/redo.

All marks have properties that can be seen by right-clicking and pressing “Properties”, or even simpler just double click the mark.

Read all about the properties dialog in Extended MarksMarks can be manipulated through the Route & Mark Managers Waypoints tab as well. Deleting a mark that is part of a route, will also change the route. Marks that are a part of a “layer” cannot be changed at all. Marks can also be imported into OpenCPN in a number of ways. Hidden waypoints are not offered as “Use nearby WPT” while creating a route.

Read all about this in the Route & Mark Manager
A general locking of all marks is available. Goto Options → Display →Advanced and tick the box. This feature is handy, to prevent accidentally moving a mark. Activate this feature when underway, deactivate it when planning.
The Man OverBoard mark can be activated through the icon in the toolbar, or through hitting Ctrl + Space-bar. The mark looks like the button and is dropped on own boats present gps position. This mark cannot be moved or deleted with the cursor or keyboard (by mistake), but can still be deleted from the Route/Waypoint manager dialog. More about Man OverBoard here.

All the details of the Mark/WP Properties dialog are dealt with in Extended Marks

OpenCPN comes with a handful of different icons that can be assigned to a mark. Right click or use the Route Manager and activate the properties dialog. The Mark Icon window in the dialog shows the available icons.

A user can install his or her own icons to use with marks and “own ship”.

1. Create a directory called “UserIcons” in the same place that holds your opencpn.ini(config) file. Instructions to find the directory (folder) location here: OpenCPN Installation

2. Add .png image files to this directory. The legacy .xpm format works as well. The icons can be any size. The name of the file (without the extension) becomes the name of the new waypoint icon. These new icons will appear on the Waypoint Properties dialog, and can be assigned to any waypoint. They can also be assigned in GPX Import files.

3. The User Iconspage contains links to a few sets of user contributed icons.

4.To replace the default own ship icon , just put a file “ownship.png” or “ownship.xpm”, containing the ownship picture you prefer, in the UserIcons directory, described above.
More about “ownship” icons and setting “ownship” size in Options Setting - Own Ship.

Located in Toolbar Button Pages

• Create Route

• Waypoint is a waypoint (“wpt” entity in the GPX file).
• Route point (“rtept” entity in the GPX file) may, but does not have to, also be a waypoint.
• All the navobjects with the exception of track points (“trkpt” entity in the GPX file) do have a “GUID” in GPX produced by OpenCPN.
• The “GUID” is the primary identifier used to see if the object already exists or not (with the exception of “wpt” import, see below).
• Two objects with the same “GUID” can not exist at the same time.
• A waypoint may also be included in zero to many routes.
• A route point may not exist without a route though (= must be included in 1 to many existing routes and unlike a waypoint, it is also for example deleted with the last route it is a part of).
• It is not possible to have the same waypoint in a layer and then import it from a GPX file.
• The logic used for “wpt” entities during the import to determine duplicates is the “Name” and “lat” + “lon”, (because we can not rely on the imported entity having the OpenCPN specific GUID extension during the import).
• The “GUID” represents the internal globally unique identifier of the navobject in OpenCPN and is completely irrelevant in the waypoint import from GPX as you can see above (It is used elsewhere for other purposes).
• Import of a Route Gpx File with duplicate waypoints will result in a message, and the existing waypoint will be shared.

When running certain versions of OpenCPN 5.2 on a Linux system, your Routes, Tracks and Waypoints might get corrupted if your “locale” settings in Linux are for a country that uses a comma (“,”) as a decimal separator.

A “locale” is a set of environmental variables in Linux that defines things such as the time/date format, the first day of the week, currency, numbers and many other values formatted in accordance with the language or region/country you set on a Linux system. In some countries a comma (“,”) is used as a decimal separator. This also affects the way the coördinates of your Routes, Tracks and Waypoints are stored in navobj.xml.

OpenCPN uses a dot (“.”) as a decimal separator. At the next start of the program, OpenCPN fails to translate the comma's into dots, which corrupts the coördinates of Routes, Tracks and Waypoints stored in navobj.xml.

The same bug can cause OpenCPN to show the world map at each startup (fully zoomed out instead of the latest map and zoom level).

This problem seems to have been solved in version Version 5.2.4 Build 2020-10-14.

See also this section in the FAQ.